Patrick Wiggins has done it again! At 2:49 a.m., Jan. 14, the Tooele County, Utah, amateur astronomer photographed a field of stars and galaxies in the area of Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper) -- and caught his fifth supernova.
This one, which he discovered four years to the day after his first astonishing find, is hosted by the barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217. It's in the galaxy's sparsely-populated outskirts. A physicist notes that galaxies can have disks that extend beyond their obvious